A governor at last: Malloy is in

Mary E. O'Leary, Journal Register News

Published
12:00 am EDT, Friday, November 5, 2010

Bridgeport officer R. Lopez (L) turns over an envelope containing the official voting returns from Bridgeport to Yolanda Santiago. Santiago is a processing technician for the Stcretary of State. Melanie Stengel/Register 11/5/10 less

Bridgeport officer R. Lopez (L) turns over an envelope containing the official voting returns from Bridgeport to Yolanda Santiago. Santiago is a processing technician for the Stcretary of State. Melanie ... more

Image
1of/1

Caption

Close

Image 1 of 1

Bridgeport officer R. Lopez (L) turns over an envelope containing the official voting returns from Bridgeport to Yolanda Santiago. Santiago is a processing technician for the Stcretary of State. Melanie Stengel/Register 11/5/10 less

Bridgeport officer R. Lopez (L) turns over an envelope containing the official voting returns from Bridgeport to Yolanda Santiago. Santiago is a processing technician for the Stcretary of State. Melanie ... more

A governor at last: Malloy is in

1 / 1

Back to Gallery

HARTFORD -- Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz late Friday afternoon updated her website to show that Dan Malloy has won the gubernatorial race to become the first Democrat to hold that office since 1991.

The tallies indicate that Malloy, with the help of the Working Families Party, got 566,498 votes to 560,861 for Republican Tom Foley, a margin that puts it beyond an automatic recount. The difference is 5,637 votes.

Click here to read the vote tallies, including from Bridgeport and New Haven

"As Secretary of the State, it is my job to make sure that everyone's voice is heard and that every vote is counted. The closeness of this election highlights the importance of every person's vote," Bysiewicz said in the statement.

The costly election, where the candidates spent a total exceeding $19 million, was hard fought with a slew of negative ads that saturated the airwaves.

Ultimately Malloy won with the help of unions throughout the state and the big cities, as well as 26,000 votes for the Working Families Party, which cross endorsed him.

The elusive voter returns from Bridgeport were finally delivered to the secretary of the state's office today by two police officers from that city

A spokesman for that office said the returns had been faxed about an hour before that.

The spokesman said they were checked, along with all the other returns already received by the office. He said usually towns fax their returns the night of the election and then deliver them with a police escort the next day

Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Foley declined to concede the election Friday, saying he does not yet have confidence in the results from Bridgeport that give Democrat Dan Malloy a 5,000 vote statewide margin of victory.

"Until we know what an accurate vote count is, we are not going to make any decisions," Foley said at a morning news conference.

He did not say he would wage a legal battle over the vote count, but said there are "irregularities" his campaign wants to research further.

Foley, who received more than 550,000 votes in the election, said it "may well take a recount to get an accurate count. There's no automatic recount, but there may well be plenty of basis for a recount."

An automatic recount is triggered if the vote margin between the candidates is less than 2,000.

Foley said he wasn't as certain Friday as he was a few days ago that he will be the 88th governor of the state, given the Bridgeport numbers, which were 17,973 for Malloy to 4,099 for Foley, according to Bridgeport Mayor William Finch.

Foley is asking that Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz not make any official announcement on the election for a few more days. Av Harris, the spokesman for her office, said the office had not officially received the returns from Bridgeport as of 11:30 a.m. and they plan to "double and triple check" them before they are released.

"Connecticut deserves better from its public officials," Foley said of the three-day delay in getting a final tabulation from all 169 towns. He remains extremely critical of Bysiewicz's announcement Wednesday that unofficially Malloy was the winner.

"We are being laughed at around this country. ... I don't want to create a situation where a result is declared here and then it's changed," Foley said.

The biggest change on Bysiewicz's website Thursday was a 2,000 vote correction from Malloy's tally in Torrington to Foley's. The Republican candidate Friday blamed that on a mistake by the secretary of the state's office.

The vote, by law, has to be certified by Bysiewicz by Nov. 25, but Foley did not think it would take that long to review the process so he was comfortable with everything that transpired in Bridgeport and other unnamed towns.

"The voters of Connecticut will benefit if I can say with confidence that I believe in these results," Foley said.

Malloy around 1:30 p.m . said he and his running mate, Nancy Wyman, were "100 percent confident that we have been chosen by the voters to be Connecticut's next governor and lieutenant governor. And chosen by a margin comfortably outside what is required by a recount."

He said the election results "should be allowed to play out in an orderly fashion and we support the process established by law." Malloy said he and Wyman were continuing their work on a transition plan.

One specific concern mentioned by Foley was the bag of ballots found in Bridgeport that were not counted until Thursday. He questioned the chain of custody for the ballots, but Bridgeport's attorney said they had been protected and both campaigns were informed of that on Wednesday morning.

They were put aside after a poll worker at the JFK School got sick had to leave and there were not sufficient personnel to complete the hand counting of photocopied ballots, according to Bridgeport Deputy City Attorney Arthur Laske

"All ballots are suppose to be counted the night of the election. So counting ballots three days later is unusual," Foley said.

Foley was asked what this hard-fought election, which saw a blizzard of negative ads by both sides, meant to him personally, given the uncertainty about the outcome.

"I spent seven months in Iraq," Foley said, laughing. "I'm used to this. I don't get much of a roller coaster. I have been pretty focused. I hope it shows how I have handled myself here on determining an accurate count on Tuesday."

Foley was sent to Iraq by President George W. Bush to oversee the privatization of government-run businesses in that country, shortly after the U.S. declared victory. He was later appointed ambassador to Ireland.

Asked to compare this experience to his time in Iraq, Foley said: "There aren't any bullets flying."

The Greenwich businessman said he has asked to meet with Bridgeport officials to go over the results and said he would also see if the Malloy campaign wanted to be present.

The candidate was also asked if he was prepared to lose.

"Yes, of course, you wouldn't get into politics if you hadn't thought it through and prepared yourself for not succeeding in a race," he said.